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Description

Iron River is a community in Michigan's relatively depressed
Upper Peninsula. In reality, it is five different cities, villages or
townships with a total population of around 10,000 huddled in one relatively
compact urbanized area. The depressed economy of this ironmining
community led to suggestions that these legal units merge. In
this microcosm, there erupted at this time, the same bitter arguments
about consolidation which are common when one of America's
great cities attempts to annex suburbanites. The smaller suburban
units rang with familiar arguments about being swallowed up in a big
city, the same arguments one would hear if Chicago proposed to merge
with a few of its suburbs. Thus, what appears to most outsiders as
one social and economic community, and certainly is so for many purposes
important to its residents, is splintered among five governments
for what seem logical reasons to local residents. Those logical reasons
which reformers too often have regarded as irrelevant or even
pathological, are at the heart of the problem of resistance to integration
in small as well as large communities. Before we can talk very
confidently about the future of any urban complex, we must try to
understand why what seems to be a single city to outsiders is viewed
so often by inhabitants as a variety of units that require legal
separateness.

Issue Date:

1965

Publisher:

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Citation Info:

In H.Goldstein, ed. 1965. The changing environment for library services in the metropolitan area; papers presented at an institute conducted by the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science, October 31-November 3, 1965. Urbana, Il: Graduate School of Library Science: 9-19.